[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/Qqu4BXTctrw”]
From the opening scene, in which we see a young man dispassionately and efficiently hang himself from a ceiling rafter while his mother bustles past his swinging body and gives him a swift telling off, it’s clear that we are in for a ride 🙂
While pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history: lonely teenager Harold, who drives a hearse, tours funerals and rarely opens his mouth; and Maude, a zesty 79-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives in a benign universe in which everything from furniture to music reminds her to value each breath.
This is a deeply eccentric film: it’s not just Harold and Maude’s relationship that sets it apart, but the jarring technical style, fans still argue about its meaning today; but whether it’s an attack on the emptiness of Vietnam-era nihilism or a fable celebrating the gift of life, it hasn’t lost its power to challenge and charm in 40 years.